Fred Kish

Modern electronics began with the invention of the transistor and the discovery of minority carrier injection. These advances have fundamentally improved and changed our world. Essential to this progress is the scalable nature of semiconductor technology and the invention of the integrated circuit (IC). The IC has become ubiquitous and has had unparalleled impact as a result of the ability of semiconductor and transistor technology to continually increase the functionality, performance, and reliability of solid-state circuits, while reducing their size, power, and costs. A key value of the IC is the ability to realize many of these improvements by eliminating the need to discretely package and assemble individual devices or smaller circuits by providing the device and circuit connections via semiconductor batch and wafer scale processing.